Dividing With Words

Issue 132

Buffalo, New York 2022

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At that ineffable moment when you’re searching for a word—the most precise word, the most vivid word, the most suitable word—you’re typically looking to match a sensation with a sound. You feel something, you believe something, or perhaps you simply see something, and you want to contort your mouth into just the right position to, somehow, almost magically, articulate what’s inside. And if you do stumble upon the right word, with the letters arising in an epiphany—she’s fatuous, that’s what I mean; he’s cavalier, that’s how to describe him—the word solidifies as true and ideal and most likely permanent. The elusive sensation locks into place, the sensation now has a label, which makes it all the more curious when you discover that once you leave your language this one word somehow splits into two.